Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday May 27, 2009 @05:40PM
from the so-very-happy-to-see-you dept.

Edis Krad writes "Redmond based company Microvision is in the last stages of developing and releasing a portable, laser-based projector, code-named 'Show WX.' The projector has a resolution of 848 by 400 pixels (WVGA) and, since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface. The device comes with its own user-replaceable battery, which means you could take it with you anywhere you want. Although there is no pricing information on their website, according to this local news video, it could cost at least $200."

What I don't understand is why, in TFS, they claim "...since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface." What the hell does the method of focussing have to do with the projection surface? I mean, laser projector is cool but it doesn't change the laws o' physics, captain. Small diode lasers only tend to stay coherent for a short distance (sometimes only inches) so this should wor

It should get there, in a couple years. The reason it will be so expensive to start with is two new technologies in one: Scanning MEMS mirror which projects the image, and the green lasers inside, which have not been produced before.

Microvision has been waiting for green laser supplier for a long time. Corning has built a facility and is ramping up production of green lasers now.

When green lasers are available in quantities of millions, the laser projectors will be built into blackberries, iphones, digital cameras, etc.

*eyebrow* This is additive not subtractive mixing. So, yes, the G in RGB. When you develop a laser that subtracts light, let me know, I want to invest.

One concept: destructive interference.

I've only done college level physics so my knowledge on this could be sketchy. But when two beams of light interact they get brighter at some points and dimmer at other points. However, it might just be that both of these interactions are absolute. So either no light, or double light... don't really know from the top of my head *shrug*

Two waves of different frequency will not interact in the same way as in say Young's double slit experiment. When two waves of nearly equal frequency are added, "beats" appear in the waveform that would appear as a brightening and darkening of the light in different places over time...
beats [wikipedia.org]

Two sine waves of the same frequency and amplitude will, when added together, result in a single sine wave of the same frequency. The amplitude of that sine wave depends on the phase angle (0 to 360 degrees) and will range from 0 (flat line) at 0/360 degrees to 2 at 180 degrees.

$400-$500 IS awesome! God do you know how much bulbs cost for even the "cheap" projectors? Hell, even if you WANT to get a bulb, try to get one for just a 4 year old projector. Its worst than god damn ink cartridges.

Its why I have been looking at the LED based ones, but they are just not bright enough for my purposes. Give me one of these with just a 10k laser life AND an HD out? I am as good as sold.

848x400 resolution... Buy six and a frame splitter (or series of splitters), and you can get 1696x1200. Buy nine, and you can get 2544x1200. Of course, mounting is up to you. Might be worth it to replace certain projectors.

I'd argue there's more to making a presentation that simply available technology.

Sadly, the amount of horrible Powerpoint presentations one has to witness in this world means my views are not very common... (at least at the point when average person, bored during presentation while on the audience, has to be a presenter and simply uses Powerpoint as a cheat-sheet)

CRT's project an electron beam into a fixed-size phosphor pixel on the screen. This is projecting a laser dot onto a wall (or whatever), I was mostly just not sure how you get an image instead of just a series of lines appearing.

You pretty much don't want a perfectly collimated beam coming out because of all the safety and health regulations. Since this projector's lasers would have power on the order of tens of watts, you would get nice burns in your retina the moment a scanning mirror fails.

I am still not sure how they would stop people losing eyesight by staring up close into the beam...

I am still not sure how they would stop people losing eyesight by staring up close into the beam...

I can buy a propane torch for $10 [hardwareworld.com] and I wouldn't want to stare up close into that while it's lit. My 10-year-old bought a bb gun at Walmart and it certainly isn't eye-safe.

My question is how they prevent it from flickering badly, since (unlike phosphors in a TV) there is no persistence from a projector screen. Seems like you'd need an extremely fast refresh rate, perhaps displaying each frame 4 times or

Actually CRTs just blast the beam to the screen segment, which will often reach a few holes in the shadow mask. This will often limit the "resolution" as it will become more blurry the smaller you go, but there isn't a fixed size. And they only need the shadow mask to seperate the colors, black and white CRTs don't have them.And aperture grill CRTs are completely free regarding vertical scanning resolution.

Go back in time a bit and think about monochrome CRTs. These projected an electron beam on to a sheet of phosphor-covered glass. Now look at CRT projectors. They do exactly the same thing, with three glass screens, and the light shines on to the screen.

Remember that the laser dot isn't a point in the mathematical sense. It has size. Move it from left to right quickly and you get a line drawn (with help from persistence of vision) and when you move it down a bit and draw another line underneath, you ge

My guess would be that it projects as three scanning lasers: for red, green, and blue. Because they would be scanning across, the field of view as the beams of light move away from projector gets larger (hence larger projection at a larger distance). However, it also gets dimmer, meaning a 12" projection distance will havea brighter image than a 100" projection distance. Also, if you're projecting closer, it looks like it will have more definition to the image as well. Not that the pixel-count will chan

Laser projector? How can you project a raster image using a inherently vector system?

I don't get it. How does it know how big the pixels should be?

(Or maybe it's obvious and I just need a beating with the clue stick here)

The light from the three RGB lasers is scanned in rows just like the electron beam in a CRT. To sweep the angle, a tiny mirror flexes very fast. The technical challenge for these projectors has been switching the mirror fast enough and getting decent performance from miniature red green and blue lasers. I think the blue one was the tough nut to crack.

You know how a TV tube works? The electron beam sweeps back and forth really fast, painting each dot on the screen? Well the laser in this thing is like the beam and the wall is like the screen. Since the laser beam can travel a great distance and still make just a small dot, so the image are in focus at different distances. Of course the farther away the screen is, the farther apart the dots are, so the image would become grainy at some point.

If the beam diffusion angle or wtfever it is called (I am not a physicist, mathematician, etc, sorry) can be sufficiently tuned the dots never get further away from each other; in fact, they might even overlap. They will be spread out, though, so they will get dimmer.

This has been done before, IIRC Samsung released one of the first TV quality raster scanning system for laser shows.

Basically a standard laser show setup uses multiple lasers (to get your RGB) combined into a single beam then passed through a device, such as a PCAOM, which acts as rather like a programmable colour filter. (this isn't the only way it can be done with solid state lasers).

Two sets of mirrors can be steered in the X and Y axis to draw your shapes, beam effects, etc.

In the case of a TV or other raster displays the beam is steered much like you would an electron beam on a regular TV. It scans a horizontal line, moves down scans across, repeat. You can switch the direction of the scan (left to right, then right to left) on alternating lines to speed up the scan rate.

I don't know what they're doing, but I see two possibilities.
One is raster scan, which others have mentioned, which involves moving mirrors and modulating the lasers. I've been told this is not practical due to the physical difficulties of controlling fast moving mirrors. (But this advice is 20 years old.)
The other is the Texas Instruments micromirror approach. The laser beam is diverged to cover the whole mirror chip, and individual micromirror movements modulate each pixel.

I think this is where I'm tripping up. I always assume laser light is perfectly collimated so that the projected dot at 1cm is that same size as at 1m, but I guess the projector uses slightly unfocused beam to generate a larger dot with relatively short increases in projection distance to avoid getting just a collection of horizontal or vertical lines appearing instead of an image.

Well, remember that the pixel is created by turning on the laser while the mirror is passing by the point where the reflected beam would hit the target. If you leave the laser on just a little while longer, your pixels will be larger, in one dimension. In other words, instead of a grid of points:. . ... . ... . ..you have a grid of lines:_ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _

The vertical gaps would be an issue at long distances, but there's no reason the horizontal gaps should be particularly large.

mini laser projector + netbook = crazy disco scene that can fit in your pocket. whip it out on the subway on friday night with some dance techno and colorful visualizations to have the swingin'est ride to the bar ever.

(not sure how popular it is at your place, but recently teens here on the stupid side of bell curve tend to listen as loud as possible to crap music on crap loudspeakers of their cellphones while walking on the street/etc.)

They exist people who don't care to party all night long. I am sure after coming home from a long day of work and some dude turns your subway in to a rave, you will find someone "accidentally" smashing it.

I'm sure the framerate is just fine. The problem is: the camera isn't in synced with the display's scan rate, and 2) lasers can turn on and off (go from full off to full on) a HELL of a lot faster than anything on usual display devices. (phosphors in a CRT unload their photons over a longer period of time, LCDs switch slower, etc) I imagine the real scan rate is actually has to be higher than 75 hz, just because of that phenomena, either that or they have to have

... are the two limitations of small projectors. They claim 10 lumens while most conventional mains-powered projectors are typically 1000-2000 lumens. That makes the product usable alone in a darkened room but not much of anywhere else. Their claim of "movie capable" battery life rather than a specific time period leads me to conclude that they watch shorter than average movies.

I predict that, like the pen scanner, [planon.com] this proves to be a geeky cool but practically useless device.

DLP picoprojectors are already pretty cheap, the problem is that it still needs to be setup like a traditional projector because it uses projecting optics... whereas with a laser projector it's easy to project in focus on any surface from any angle (although you would need programmable keystone correction to make the most of that).

It's called the SHOW WX, not SHOW WV. FTFA: "WX stands for "wide experience", referring to the wide image format, wide color range and wide always in-focus operation."

As a VJ, I could really use one of these instead of hauling around my huge HD projector, since I only project at 320x240 anyway (to keep real-time video mixing fast). Hopefully the battery really lasts as long as a movie though!

Man no kidding, we're just buying a second projector to play out with (we as a 3 man crew mix Dnb and psytrance) after the first one fried. A pocketsized projector that matches the lazers? Totally win, even at 500$. I remember seeing really cool demos done with lazer projection and fog machines too. I wonder what one of these looks like through haze.

when the resolution is at least 1024 wide (1280 preferable) and it can project with more than 10 lumens of light! (Their Macromedia Flash demo thing on the website is waaaaaay optimistic about how bright it will look). The slashvertisement site "specs" also conveniently leaves off critical information such as what resolutions it can accept (and downscale), what types of cables are included, what type of battery and real estimates of battery life, exactly how much power does it pull (can you operate it liv

It's is SO going into an iPhone in 2 or 3 years. From that point on consider this : people use the motion sensor to stabilise the image, which will be pretty cool, and secondly, people start making a whole bunch of iPhone apps to make all sorts of "pranks".

Hard to tell what they'll come up with but you just know that kids will have a field day with that. And by day I mean decade.

I heard from a friend who works at a cinema, that some years ago, they tried to build laser projectors. They were incredibly sharp and brilliant. So brilliant in fact, that the viewers got their faces painfully burned. (Dunno if just from passing by. Or from looking at it, which would mean their eyes got damaged too.)

It may only be an anecdote. But I do not trust these things. ^^

Oh, and with the massive parallelism of LCD and DLP displays, I was happy for the not very healthy flickering of line-scan display

I do work at a cinema. Your "friend" is talking fantasy. The standard for years past and years to come is and will continue to be Film. Who would have access to a full color movie-capable scanning laser projection system? I can find no evidence to support the claim that any audience in cinematic history has had their faces BURNED from laser projection, not even to say that this has ever existed in a cinema.For those curious about what the !@#$ top poster is going on about and how the Microvision scanning la